Unveiling the Potentialities Provided by New Technologies: A Process to Pursue Technology Epiphanies in the Smartphone App Industry

When new technologies approach the market, companies usually look for ways to improve existing applications or simply to replace previous technologies. The management literature identifies several strategies for gaining value from technological discontinuities, including improving performance, becoming the cost leader and being the first-mover, and scholars have identified several managerial practices and processes to leverage these various strategies. Recent literature suggests that there might be something more, namely, discovering new meanings, enabled by the technological discontinuity: a technology epiphany. No research has yet tried to understand what companies could do to actually develop such innovations. This paper aims to identify a process companies could adopt to pursue a technology epiphany strategy. Employing a case study approach, we investigate the navigation apps industry, both turn-by-turn and marine, to understand how companies manage the technology discontinuity embedded in smartphones. Comparing several players in the two industries, we first demonstrate that the rise of a new market leader is not related to a traditional strategy but to a technology epiphany. Finally, we propose a five-step process to pursue a technology epiphany strategy.